Not only is the article three, or four if count 5.9, major releases out of date, it's a pretty breezy and unconvincing critique based on a single, largely idiomatic, sub and format which in 11 years of Perl I've never used once. I've seen this same style of critique of Perl in particular from Python devs. Perhaps with time, compassion, and a little fluvoxamine they can get over it.

That said, it does bring up the actual major weakness of Perl which is, almost paradoxically, its greatest strength as I see it. It's overly flexible. You can write crazy, illegible nonsense because you can code stream of consciousness / this is how it fell together after I tried the first 15 things that made sense for the first 15 things in my way instead of trying to see the problem holistically.

Perl is so good at solving problems in nearly any fashion the solver devises that it becomes an albatross on the next dev too often.

I've had to wear a lot of albatrosses too but I still wouldn't trade it for anything.